Twenty years have passed since the making of ‘Titanic’ but it seems like people are still not over yet with the film’s controversy surrounding Jack’s death at the end of the film. Still, people continue to question why Rose wouldn’t make room for Jack on the floating door so that he, too, could have survived.

While the film director, James Cameron, has maintained silence over the controversy for a very long time, Kate Winslet, the lead actress in the film, has spoken out about the issue in the past.

She agreed with the question over whether there was enough room for Jack on her raft so that he could also survived. She once said “I think he could have actually fit on that bit of door.” She has also commended Leonardo DiCaprio’s feelings towards the controversial ending by saying “He really doesn’t care about the door.”

Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio and director James Cameron on the set of Titanic. vanityfair

However, as people keep questioning the controversial ending it seems like James Cameron got tired of hearing the question over again and again. He finally speaks up and has settled the debate about Jack’s death once and for all.

When Cameron was recently asked again about the issue in an interview with Vanity Fair, he said, “The answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies. Very simple. Obviously it was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him.”

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The Canadian filmmaker went on to express dismay at being still asked about the artistic choice. He says adding:

“I think it’s all kind of silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later. But it does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the audience that it hurts them to see him die. Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless. . . . The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down. It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons.”

When asked if he is usually such a stickler for physics, he explains,

“I am. I was in the water with the piece of wood putting people on it for about two days getting it exactly buoyant enough so that it would support one person with full free-board, meaning that she wasn’t immersed at all in the 28 degree water so that she could survive the three hours it took until the rescue ship got there. [Jack] didn’t know that she was gonna get picked up by a lifeboat an hour later; he was dead anyway. And we very, very finely tuned it to be exactly what you see in the movie because I believed at the time, and still do, that that’s what it would have taken for one person to survive.”

Meanwhile, James Cameron and Kate Winslet will reunite in the future as she has a role in one of the ‘Avatar’ sequels.